Hallelujah, Or Whatever You Say To The Devil
by Nell Fratelli
Summary: An extended song story. Brought to you from the mind of Roy Harper. Now M because... I have a problem.
1. Chapter 1

**A "Hallelujah" story for our favorite YJ pair. Because it just had to be done. (Hopefully I won't screw it up.) The first installment, for your holiday enjoyment.**

* * *

_Well I heard there was a sacred chord_

_That David played, and it pleased the Lord_

_But you don't really care for music, do you?_

* * *

"Cheshire."

From his position far above the floor of the opera house, in one of the boxes circling the ornate ceiling, he saw the black form in the dark pause and turn, masked eyes sweeping the place for the source of the voice. The spectacular echo effect of the theater should have made her search difficult, so he was surprised when the cat eyes locked with his only seconds after his call.

"Red," she replied, and sounded genuinely pleased. In one fluid motion, the painted steel mask came off, and he was met with her own stunningly feline features, somehow distinguishable despite the heavy shadow of the place. "It's been too long. Fancied an after-hours tour, too?" She gestured at the hall around her. "Pretty swanky, right?"

"Swanky enough for an assassination, apparently."

He heard the smile. "What, I'm not allowed to have interests?"

"Don't play games." He tightened his grip on the bow in his hands. For some reason, the arrow kept slipping. Only slightly, but enough to ruin the shot if he went for it.

"Don't be like that, Red," she crooned, and it was ridiculous how only imagining those plump lips sinking into a pout made his pulse race. "We're just two music enthusiasts, checking out the set for that Broadway hit. What was it called again - _Hallelujah_?"

"Music enthusiasts, huh?" Damn it, why were his fingers shaking? "I find it hard to believe that you put in a day of murder and thievery to go home and listen to Leonard Cohen."

She grinned, and even in the darkness of the theater's black lights, his sharp gaze picked up the faint shine of her lips.

"I have all kinds of interests. Why don't you let me finish up here and I'll show you a few?"

A beep in his ear alerted him to a call from the Watchtower.

"Red Arrow. Has Cheshire been apprehended?"

He kept his eyes trained on the dark shape of the woman thirty feet below. "Yeah, Tornado. Just give me a few minutes to wrap up here."

"Your robot friend?" she asked, echoed voice dripping with a strange kind of sarcastic seduction. "Oh, Red, I thought you came all by yourself. Now my feelings are hurt."

He saw it coming. He really did. The quick but perceptible twist of her arm towards the line of pouches on her belt, the flash of white that came up and settled over her face again. He even had a split second between the moment when her arm drew back and when the smoke bomb struck the banister of the box he was in - he could've loosed the arrow he'd been holding, notched and ready even before she'd entered the place. He'd had the opportunity. Why hadn't he taken it?

By the time the smoke cleared and he'd coughed the thick fumes out of his lungs, she - Cheshire - was gone.

"Damn it."

* * *

Back at the motel, he threw his bow and quiver in the dark with particular accuracy onto the center of the bed, cursing as he tramped into the bathroom. Without switching on the light, he turned the shower head on and reached for the anti-adhesive aerosol bottle concealed in his boot so he could de-mask.

Despite his uncannily good vision, he didn't see it until after stepping out of the shower. There, glaring out at him from across the small bathroom, written in a looping hand on the fogged mirror in bright scarlet,

_No, I don't particularly like music. But there are plenty of things I do like._

_Until next time, Red._

He reached out and touched the edges of a large and perfectly-formed print of puckered lips right next to 'Red', and his fingers came away scarlet.

Lipstick.


	2. Chapter 2

**Not sure yet if the chapters will be sequential. It just so happens that these first two are. Be on your guard.**

* * *

_Well it goes like this_

_The fourth, the fifth_

* * *

This was wrong.

Every fiber of his being knew it. Every feeling, every thought, everything he did and hoped for now was wrong.

She was a murderer. An assassin of the shadows. A sworn enemy of the law, of heroes, of the entire Justice League.

And she'd given him her phone number.

* * *

The first few texts he wrote off as wrong numbers or pranks - those kids at Mount Justice didn't _always_ have a mission to keep them occupied.

The fourth couldn't possibly be ignored.

He'd heard about sexting. He didn't completely live under a rock. But over the course of several weeks, he received a crash course on the subject from an unknown number; prying questions fraught with flirtation and innuendo that he read, pondered over, and promptly deleted after divining no clues about the sender. Responding wouldn't be worth the risk of furthering the... correspondence.

But when the fourth text arrived more than a month after the first, there could be no simple forgetting.

In retrospect, he hit the open button with far too little consideration. He should have checked the number out long before and gotten to the bottom of it all.

He hit the open button and was accosted with a photograph of a woman, barely clothed in some kind of elaborate black lace, hand raised in a suggestive wave of thin fingers, and face covered with a white and red steel mask.

To say he was floored would have been generous.

Not giving it as much thought as he should, he tapped out _'Cheshire?'_ and sent.

* * *

No word - or picture - came for two weeks. He would have forgotten about it, but it was late autumn and there was a lull in criminal activity, so he had too much free time. Between training and eventless patrols and bridge duty on the Watchtower, there wasn't much for him to do besides sit in his empty apartment and ruminate.

Not stare at the picture. No. He'd only kept it on his phone because it might prove useful in discovering where she was and exactly how she'd gotten his number. If he opened it every once in a while, it was only to scrutinize the dark brick wall in the background, to search for leads as to where the photograph had been taken.

Clearly, it was only work-related.

* * *

It came late on night. He was lying in bed and waiting for sleep to quit its cowardly dance around the edges of his periphery, but the low vibrating sound of phone against nightstand cured any hope of rest.

_'About time, Red. I was beginning to think you didn't like my sense of humor.'_

His thumbs flew across the phone's keyboard, and he scowled at himself for being so eager. _'What do you want, Cheshire?'_

The response came even quicker than his own:

_'I see you weren't paying attention before. I'll say it again.'_

The second came right on the tail of the first, and his accepting tap on the screen opened a copy of the mask and negligée.

The heat that arose on the back of his neck was because of the stupid hooded sweatshirt he wore. That was all.

_'You're insane.'_

She had to be. Either that - and this was more probable - or she was trying to pull off the most humiliating and obvious trap that anyone had ever walked into. In which case he had an obligation to continue, to play the player and thwart whatever kind of infiltration plot this was.

_'Some people say that.'_

The last text of the night was another picture. Mask off, dark hair framing the face he'd only seen on League monitors, even darker eyes staring straight out of the screen and at what felt like himself, and fingers raised to thick lips colored the same shade of scarlet as the motel mirror. Blowing him a kiss.

Degrading infiltration plot aside, he was in way over his head.


	3. Chapter 3

**This may or may not make a lot of sense... It could be one of those things that is logical only to the writer. Here's hoping it's not.**

* * *

_The minor fall, and the major lift_

_The baffled king composing hallelujah_

* * *

Nothing had changed.

When he answered a League distress call in New Mexico, it was to find Cheshire and a team of her Shadows cronies fighting tooth and nail against an injured Green Arrow.

"Good to see you, kid," Ollie said with a grin, but grimaced at the pull in the nasty puncture would on his shoulder when he strung his bow. "Watch out for the ninja girl. She's got a great arm with those star things."

He didn't reply because he suddenly became very occupied with dodging very rhythmic sai swipes, and the white mask laughed at him as he twisted and ducked.

To his deep frustration, they all escaped. He would've gone after them, but Ollie needed an antidote for the jellyfish toxin, and the villains had been spirited away in the Shadows' ever high-flying and agile helicopters.

But mostly because Ollie had been poisoned.

"We'll get 'em next time, Roy," the older man said bracingly.

He glared at the disappearing helicopter, swallowed by the thick storm clouds that were approaching.

Yes. Next time.

* * *

Nothing had changed.

He had an assassin in his contacts list, but that didn't mean anything. He'd had the number run through the providers' records - prepaid phone plan, purchased in cash the day before the first text. So there was nothing he could do about it until she screwed up and gave something away. Which she would, because at some point, criminals always get sloppy.

There was nothing that could be done, because nothing had really changed.

* * *

Next time came a lot sooner than he thought.

Only a few days after New Mexico, he was dispatched to St. Louis. And who was it sneaking around the docks in the shadows?

"How do you keep finding me, Red?" The quiet sound of her voice, and then chills up his spine. Which he blamed on the frosty weather.

"Criminals don't get to ask the questions." Yes, keep the dialogue short. Less opportunity to get tripped up.

A brush against his arm. Did she just touch him?

"Is that any way to treat a lady? Especially after those nice presents I sent you."

Close, close, she was so close. He whirled in the dark and was met with a haunting laugh.

Why didn't this place have street lamps? Damn Missouri.

Might as well keep her talking, then.

"Why?"

"Why what?"

He scowled as he turned as slowly and noiselessly as he could. "The pictures."

Another laugh. It was low and light at the same time - how was that possible? "Let's say I was hoping for a 'show me yours and I'll show you mine' exchange."

A dark shadow, barely perceptible from the surrounding night, flew before his eyes just as he felt a body pressing against his own. He grunted in surprise and took an involuntary step backwards.

"Don't pretend you don't want to, Red," she whispered, and he felt her breath on his neck just before being tugged down by the straps of his quiver.

The last intelligible thought he had was how someone so small could be so strong.

* * *

Nothing had changed. Not really.

Well, he had no idea where his pants were. That was an inconvenient development.

But nothing else had changed.

He knew now what happened when you fraternize with the enemy. You end up with a failed mission and MIA pants. And now that his... _curiosity_ had been sated, it wasn't going to happen again.

Phone vibrated against nightstand. He reached for it in a totally cool and calm manner.

_'That was fun. We should do it again sometime.'_

* * *

Nothing had changed. If he was being honest, he'd been thinking about her for months so, technically, nothing was different. The part that he had something to remember - the silkiness of her black hair, the smooth friction of her skin, the feel of her lips, the force of her pushing and grabbing and -

"You okay, sport?"

His neck jerked up so fast that it cricked.

Ollie was looking down at him, holding two coffees and looking much better than he had a few days ago. The Watchtower med bay had learned a while back to keep a stock of toxin and poison antidotes on hand for the League's more... purist enemies.

Ollie handed him a cup. "Bridge duty getting to you?"

He took the cup and rubbed the back of his neck. That was going to start aching soon.

"Yeah. Bridge duty."

Ollie chuckled and clapped a hand to his shoulder. "No need to look so baffled, Roy. It's just technology."

He closed his eyes. Baffled.

* * *

Had something changed?


	4. Chapter 4

**At last, a chapter appears! Apologies for the delay... Hopefully it's not as cheesy as I think it is.**

* * *

_Hallelujah_

Wrong.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Everything about it was wrong - twisted sick, _wrong_. He was betraying the League, betraying his country, betraying himself and everything he ever believed in or fought for. He was literally sleeping with the enemy. And enjoying it.

Ignoring _her_ - which was impossible, the way she would interrupt his day with text messages and voice mails and barge in on his missions or straight into his apartment - even the betrayal itself was an incredible turn-on.

Which was wrong. Having feelings for a strong, confident, heart-stoppingly sexy woman was one thing; relishing the rush of adrenaline every time he followed her off a crime scene was another entirely.

If he was going to analyze it, he would've said something about the attraction of forbidden trysts to someone who regularly took beatings for standing up for what was right. Or maybe something like the secret sense of power at defying authority figures like Batman or Ollie, one of the other of whom had micromanaged his life since he'd been old enough to _have_ a life. But thinking about Ollie only conjured up unwanted but persistent images of rage and hurt and disappointment, and he didn't want to deal with that.

The simple answer to banishing such thoughts: think about the dark seductress who had probably left half a dozen texts on his phone since the last time he checked.

It was a fail-proof strategy.

* * *

Of course, she wasn't always a joy. It wasn't unusual for him to return home with an empty quiver because she'd stolen all his extremely expensive arrows, or a jumpsuit with various genitalia spelled out in the cut fabric, or a missing sock. She knew how he hated not having matching socks. And then there were the injuries: gouges on his shoulders and back from her nails, bruises all over his hips and thighs, and love bite marks that she got carried away with all too easily. She was a devil alright, and not just the sexy Halloween kind. Especially if there had been more than a week or two in between meetings, he would come back to Star City looking like a victim of domestic abuse.

He would be lying if he said it wasn't incredibly hot. But the lesions and abrasions only added to the daily strains of the job. It couldn't be said that they helped his performance. Thankfully, no one on the Watchtower seemed to notice.

The Cave, however, was another matter.

"You're uncharacteristically cheerful these days," came the husky voice of his would-be replacement one day.

"Artemis," he grimaced in greeting, more on principle than because he harbored any remaining ill-will towards her. She wasn't so bad. Her archery could use a few more years of honing, but she wasn't so bad.

The younger girl - was she still a teenager? He couldn't keep track of all the birthdays anymore - had a taunting look about her.

Great.

"Been finding an outlet for all that... frustration?" she asked smugly, and it was all too obvious what she meant.

"None of your business."

She laughed at his scowl. He'd never heard her laugh before, but there was something eerily familiar about the sound...

"Just don't slip up again like you did tonight," she continued with a toss of her gratuitously long ponytail and hard glint in her eye - also eerily familiar... "You were so busy watching Cheshire that you left Wally vulnerable to attack."

He froze at the mention of his assassin, only to loosen again when the name was glossed over.

"You're lucky I got Icicle Jr.," she was saying as he snapped back just in time for her parting glower. Grey eyes flashed menacingly, and she jabbed him in the chest with a finger. "If Wally had gotten hurt because _you_ were sucking at your job, I would've kicked your grinning ass so hard you would be wishing for the good old team-free Speedy days."

He'd told everyone to stop calling him Speedy.

He made a mental note to never again think Artemis wasn't so bad.

"Cute," he called to her swinging ponytail as she turned and left. "Sticking up for the boyfriend."

"You're damn straight, Speedy."

* * *

Maybe his performance was taking a hit. He really wouldn't have been able to forgive himself if someone had gotten hurt or worse because he couldn't focus.

"Rough day, loverboy?"

Or maybe he could.

That night left him with scratches, aches, a hickey the size of his palm, and a whole slew of memories to get him through his next stint on the Bridge, which was as precious as a gift from above.

Hallelujah, She-devil.


	5. Chapter 5

_Your faith was strong, but you needed proof_

_You saw her bathing on the roof_

_Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you_

* * *

There had been a few things he'd relied on to be absolutely true: Earth revolved around the sun, reality TV was all crap, and he was Roy Harper. Until very recently, all these things were known and accepted facts.

Until the Shadows used him like a puppet to infiltrate and attempt to destroy the Justice League.

He'd heard the explanations. Batman, Miss Martian, the Manhunter - they all confirmed it. The evidence was undeniable.

He was not Roy Harper.

* * *

It had been months since they'd started seeing each other, but he'd never been the one to seek Cheshire out - she had always come to him. It was strange when he thought about it, but there wasn't much about him anymore that wasn't strange.

She'd responded to his call almost immediately, and of course he should've trusted Cheshire to be in Reno when he actually needed her - needed to hear what she knew. He, unlike anyone else in the League, had eyes on the inside of the enemy's operation. It was only a matter of getting her to talk.

The real Roy had to be out there. It didn't make sense for his cloners to destroy the biological donor. What if their _experiment_ had gone wrong, and he'd grown without a leg or an arm or an optical nerve? What if it _had_ gone wrong, and he wasn't the first copy of Roy Harper?

He had to find him. The _real_ him. He figured he at least owed the guy that much.

* * *

He hadn't expected her to be lounging naked in a Jacuzzi. Fucking rich assassins with their ritzy hotels and private rooftop spas.

"You look like you've been having a nice day," she taunted as he approached, hating himself because even at a time like this - when somebody's _life_ hung in the balance - he couldn't ignore the stunning smoothness of her skin in the soft lowlight of the city and the more ephemeral moonlight resting on her shoulders like the lightest of shawls.

He was disgusting. A pathetic base creature who didn't deserve to have ever been born.

Oh. Right.

"Why don't you join me?" she asked casually, and there wasn't an inch of her luscious body that he couldn't see from his standing position on the opposite edge of the hot tub. From the glint in her eye, she knew exactly what was running through his mind - his fake mind.

"This isn't a pleasure trip, Chesh."

"Do you want it to be?"

He didn't think about the way she was smirking at him, about the way the water bubbled and lapped at her collar bones, about the pearly glow of the light on her bare neck, or about the damp tendrils of glossy black hair that had fallen out of the loose knot on top of her head. He thought about Roy, abducted and spending years as a lab rat, having tissue harvested from him by faceless shadows, possibly even dead.

_No, not dead._ He couldn't be.

"I need to talk to you." He was very aware of each muscle pulling and straining to move his lips and jaw. His cloned lips and jaw.

"Well, this roof is mine for another three days, and at the moment it's nude-only. So if you want to talk, you'd better strip."

Fists clenched at his sides. "Did you know?"

Her angular face betrayed nothing, but there could be no doubt about what he meant. "Of course I did."

"And you never said a thing."

Pearl shoulders shrugged up and down. "It never seemed important."

"Not important? What could be any more fucking important than _this_?"

"Worse things have happened." She was so maddeningly cavalier - she didn't even miss a beat.

"Worse than finding out you're a lab-bred traitor, grown in a fucking petri dish?"

"Actually, it was more like a giant test tube."

Too much. It was all too much.

"Is he still alive?" He had to know. Had to find him, at any cost. At all costs.

If he hadn't known better, he might have thought that Cheshire's impregnable face softened, just a little. But he did know better - why would she warm up now, after months? The steely mask never slipped, not even for a second. She was a killer, after all; it wouldn't do for her to show emotion of any kind.

"He was a year ago or so, when I last saw him," she replied, and didn't break eye contact - that dark gaze bored into him, and any other time he would've kicked himself for being so vulnerable, especially in front of her. "But the Shadows have moved him at least half a dozen times since then."

So he was alive. Roy Harper could still be alive. He felt his chest cave in just as it seemed to swell with hope, because even if he did manage to find Roy, _he_ would still be just Roy the copy.

A wet slender hand reached out of the water for his, and - maybe it was because he was so utterly overthrown by everything that had happened, or maybe he really was an incurable monster who would choose sex over the most important search and rescue of his artificially-made life - he numbly allowed her to pry and coax him out of his clothes that suddenly seemed to weigh him down, and allowed her to pull him into the water with her under the moonlight.


	6. Chapter 6

**Three chapters in as many days? I'm kind of proud of myself. Happy holidays to you!**

* * *

_She tied you to a kitchen chair_

_She broke your throne and she cut your hair_

_And from your lips she drew the hallelujah_

* * *

Time passed.

Everyone had stopped caring. Everyone had given up. Roy Harper couldn't possibly be alive. Almost ten years had gone by since the original had been seen by his friends, and now those friends had given him up for dead.

But not him. He could never give up, because if he did, how could he live with himself?

"But you're not living, Roy," Dinah told him once. They had been talking, though he had no idea what about. She was looking at him with sad eyes when he turned to her, and one of her strong hands gripped his.

"What do you mean? Of course I am." The words left his mouth with no true question. He wasn't really wondering what she meant. He found it difficult to care about other things these days.

She looked so heavyhearted. "You're going through the motions, but you're not really here."

"I don't know what you're talking about. I've been here the whole time."

But the real Roy Harper wasn't.

* * *

He'd looked everywhere, talked to everyone, made every possible inquiry and deal. No one knew anything, but everyone seemed to know someone who might know something, and that was enough. As long as there was even the slightest whisper of a lead, he would hunt it down until he found Roy.

"You're talking to yourself again."

It was dark in the apartment, and even though he hadn't heard the window open, he knew where she was standing. He didn't have to look up from where he was lying on the raggedy old couch to know who it was. It could only be one person.

"Cheshire."

No sound of footsteps, but he suddenly felt her presence leaning over the back of the couch.

"You don't look so good, Red. Forget to go to the gym again this month?" Taunting, she was always taunting.

He didn't care much anymore.

"No time."

Her low chuckle sent goosebumps skating over his arms; it was an enigmatic mixture of a tuneless hum and dark amusement. He remembered every time he had heard it before, every time he had abandoned the search for a selfish distraction.

"I see you haven't had time to get a haircut in a while, either." Slender fingers pushed themselves through the shaggy hair that had fallen over his forehead and cheekbones. The touch would have surprised him, unseen in the blackness, but nothing surprised him anymore. Two hands circled around his face, and he felt warm breath on his cheek and picked up the subtle but familiar scent of cherry blossoms and silver polish.

"I can fix that for you."

When he'd finally realized what she was doing, he was already seated in one of his rickety kitchen chairs. He'd tried several times to get up and leave - he'd only been on the couch because he was waiting for his contact in Chile to email him back - and after forcing him down for the third time, she had laughed and pointed out that he'd done this to himself.

Now he was tied to the chair. Apparently Cheshire kept untold lengths of steel cables on her person at all times. How convenient.

"We could've done this the easy way," she admonished as her scissors snipped smugly away and ginger hair fell onto his shoulders and drifted to the kitchen floor. "It's just a haircut. No need to be so stubborn about it."

No need to be stubborn? The real Roy was out there, and there was no need to be stubborn?

The cords around his wrists and calves bit into his skin as he twisted and tugged against them. If he could just break them, he could leave Cheshire here and go use the Watchtower equipment to get in touch with the guy in Chile. With one forceful tug, he felt his skin give way as blood, hot and wet, rolled down the curve of his left wrist and down the lengths of both his shins.

"This is a waste of time. Nobody cares what my hair looks like. I should be looking for -"

A sharp blow to the back of his neck cut him off, and the edges of the world became fuzzy and white before everything went black. The last thing he heard was her voice in his ear.

"I care."

* * *

He awoke to someone singing. The scissors were on the counter three feet away from him, the shower was on in the bathroom, and the sounds of singing in some other language was audible through the semi-lit apartment - she must've turned more lights on. There was a dull pounding behind his eyes, and an ache at the base of his skull.

Fucking assassins.

A short while later, Cheshire emerged from the bathroom wrapped in one of his old towels with her thick black hair dripping down her back, still singing under her breath. She padded over in bare feet to the garbage can to his left and dropped a plastic bottle inside.

"You're all out of shampoo." She turned back to him and leaned against the counter, gaze unexpectedly boring into his. The pounding in his head intensified to that of a small mallet slamming against the backs of his eyes. Did she always have to look at him like that?

"Are you going to untie me?"

She looked up and down, sizing him up, eyes lingering on the trails of blood at his bindings. "Depends."

He waited for more, but there didn't seem to be any. Remembering the email he was expecting, he jerked involuntarily against the cables. "I don't have time for this shit, Cheshire. Cut me loose."

Towel still tied snugly around her - too snugly, he could see every line of her body - she pushed off the counter and took the few steps forward until she was standing directly before him. "You could say 'thank you' for the haircut." With a lurch of self-loathing, he noticed how fresh her newly-scrubbed face looked without any trace of her usual dark eye makeup - he remembered calling it her "war paint." Beads of water trickled from her hair down her neck and over her collar bones. He twisted against his bonds again without knowing.

"You're not much fun when you're just running after the kid. He's probably dead by now, you know."

No. He couldn't be.

"Why do you even bother?" She was watching him carefully now. The back of his neck began to warm - she was so close - and he felt a shame so astute that he would've kicked himself for wanting her if both his legs hadn't been tied to the chair. Thinking about _that_ at a time like _this_?

Horrifyingly selfish.

"Because I'm living a stolen life," he ground out between clenched teeth, glaring right back up into Cheshire's black eyes.

He didn't think about the towel. Didn't think about the water. Didn't think about her staring at him while he was tied up. _Think about Roy._

They remained silent for a moment. He thought of a thousand more reasons why he still bothered - why he would bother until Roy Harper was found - but didn't give voice to them. He was sure he'd be wasting his breath.

"It's not your fault," she said after the long pause, resting two hands on his shoulders and leaning in. He didn't have time to formulate a response before she pressed her lips to his, sliding her hands up his shoulders and neck and into his newly-cut hair.

There was no time for this. Roy Harper was out there, and he'd wasted enough time already.

"It's not your fault, Red," she half-growled against his jaw, and her nails dug into his scalp until he grunted. "He's probably dead, so get over it and kiss me like you mean it."

He did.


	7. Chapter 7

_Baby, I've been here before_

_I know this room, and I've walked this floor_

_I used to live alone before I knew you_

* * *

She stayed in the apartment a long time. Maybe it was because she'd discovered upon rifling through his fridge that shampoo wasn't the only thing he was out of, or maybe it was because she'd gotten tired of the noise and lights and sleeplessness of Reno. He didn't ask.

It turned out that his contact in Chile hadn't gotten back to him because the unreliable internet service had crashed on the whole region, but when he flew over there, the low-level gangster had three-year-old information that was completely useless. He'd busted the hack for drug possession - seriously, two tons of heroin? - and turned him in to the Chilean authorities. And took his bribe back.

He was empty-handed. Again. Months - had it been years yet? - of searching, and nothing besides a few jailed blue-collar criminals to show for it. He was running in circles, chasing a tail that seemed to never have existed. Hunting through familiar rooms that he knew were all empty, for no other reason than that he didn't know how to stop.

* * *

When he'd returned to Star City, he'd been surprised out of his dark musings by her presence. He'd been gone almost a week.

"Still here?" he grunted as he trudged through the door, equipment bag clanging against his shoulder. Archery paraphernalia did not make for quiet travel. She was watching TV on his couch. It looked so... normal.

"What do you care?" she threw back by way of greeting as he thudded across the one-room apartment.

He had to agree with her on that.

* * *

The irritating part of Cheshire staying with him was that she made him do things. Take out the garbage, go on a run, don't forget to shower and shave. Eat whatever she put in front of him two or three times a day. It angered him at first - didn't she see he was _busy_? - but after a while, he did everything she said without complaint. He supposed it was a sort of kindness she was doing, though he didn't know why. It felt like it would have been kinder of her to let him focus on Roy. Only then could he really get any benefit out of physical fitness or personal hygiene.

Every day, it was wake up after three or four hours of sleep, check his phone and email for messages - sometimes from leads, sometimes from Ollie or Dynah or Wally or Nightwing, wondering if he was still alive - then spend the next eighteen or so hours going over his lists of contacts, files on abandoned Shadow facilities, research cloning, and add to the ever-changing maps on his wall of places with known Shadow activity, hoping that something would finally fall into a pattern or trail, something he could _track_.

For more than two months, a green pin had been stuck in Michigan, right on the dot labeled _Star City_. Too bad it wasn't moving him towards anything.

"You've got until my toes are dry," Cheshire called to him one night from the bedroom, "and then you're shutting that damn phone off and coming to bed, or you can start feeding yourself again."

"I don't care about eating," he grumbled. Now that he thought about it, he couldn't remember the last time he made food for himself.

Wait.

He was off the couch and in the bedroom before Cheshire had even heard him take a step.

"You're painting your nails?"

She looked up from her toes, the tips of which were glistening a deep, wet red. "What?"

"Off the bed. Now."

She shot him a half amused and half I'd-like-to-see-you-make-me look, with no small amount of frustration sprinkled in. "Really, Red? You're catatonic over your MIA clone daddy, and _this_ is what jerks you out of it?"

He glared as she dipped the brush back into the tiny bottle, balanced precariously on his _white_ comforter, threatening to ruin it with its maliciously noticeable tint. "It'll stain."

Cheshire chuckled as she drew the thin brush over the length of her pinkie nail. "Don't get your panties in a twist. Besides, I think you lost any right to tell me what to do in your bed when I started paying all your bills."

He blinked. "You've been paying my bills?"

Dark eyes flashed with something he couldn't place. "And your rent. Why do you think your phone hasn't been cut off, or you haven't been evicted?" He frowned. He hadn't thought about any of that at all. "You probably haven't noticed, Red, but you were pretty much out of cash by the time I got here." She smirked tauntingly. "So I guess this is my apartment now. Which means I'll paint my nails wherever I want."

* * *

Some time later, after he had rolled off her warm and inviting body - but before he remembered that they'd had sex the night before, and that he should have been hacking Johns Hopkins' biological engineering department's experimental research files instead of fucking his bedmate - his heart stopped as the corner of his eye picked up a small smear of red.

"You got your fucking nail polish on my sheets!" he cried, grabbing for the soiled corner draped over Cheshire's bare stomach.

"I still can't believe you care about _this_, of all things," she drawled seductively, clearly not pleased that he'd moved away, as her fingers trailed lightly around his jaw. He clenched it, both to demonstrate that he was pissed and to remind himself that twice in twenty-four hours was more than he deserved. There was no time left to spend with her.

He looked back to the stain between his fingers to help him ignore the delicate touch on his neck and sucked a breath in through the weakening wall of his teeth. Stupid nail polish. "I think I preferred living alone," he mumbled, releasing the sheet and turning onto his back.

Cheshire chuckled and tugged the white blankets - _stained_ _forever_ blankets - up around herself. Star was beginning to feel that Michigan chill now. "Just be glad that you're getting fed."


	8. Chapter 8

**Maybe this doesn't fit the lyrics, but it fits the plot and this is what came out.**

**Happy Christmas!**

* * *

_I've seen your flag on the marble arch_

_But love is not a victory march_

_It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah_

* * *

He didn't know how long it had been there. A faint layer of dust suggested that it had at least not gone up overnight. But how could he have not noticed something like that?

He felt around on the bed beside him. Nothing - cold and empty. That was odd. She was never up before he was, let alone before it was even light outside.

"Chesh?" he called to the dark apartment, and wondered if his voice rasped like a fifty-year smoker because he'd just woken up. Maybe he'd caught something.

There was no answer.

He looked back at the poster, visible by the incessant lowlight from the city seeping through the bedroom window. It was suspended directly across from where he was on the bed, hanging on the wall as if proclaiming itself to him and demanding he take notice.

A gigantic Cheshire cat.

* * *

As he went about his day - turn laptop on, brush teeth, check phone, shower, check email, log onto the League's secure criminal database, check phone - he began to notice other things, like the growing pile of dirty laundry in the corner of the bedroom, the diminishing stock of socks in his dresser, the mountain of dishes in the sink, and how hungry he was. Several times he looked up from his screens and maps, expecting her to come charging into sight with a plate of stir fry like she usually made a point to do at least once in twelve hours, but after the sky outside the window grew dark again without her appearing, he figured he was on his own.

At least there was food in the fridge.

* * *

Sleep refused to visit him that night. It wasn't unusual - he frequently felt too restless to let his eyelids fall shut for more than a few minutes at a time - but that night there was no bossy ninja to hold a blade to his throat and force him back onto the pillows. No one threatened to staple his eyelids together if he didn't go to sleep.

It was probably sick that he missed that.

He looked around the dark room, pointedly not looking at the wide-eyed cat across from him, until his gaze fell upon the clothes pile in the corner. He had no idea how long it had been there. That really wasn't sanitary.

There was a twenty-four hour laundromat two blocks away, which would have been useless if he hadn't found a dish of quarters on the kitchen counter next to the sink. Another thing he hadn't noticed.

The laundromat was empty besides the napping attendant. The whole place smelled like cheap fabric softener and loneliness. He wondered how long it had been since he'd done laundry. It must not have been that long, since he hadn't seemed to have run out of underwear, but he didn't remember doing it in... a while.

The apartment was still empty when he returned. Not that he had expected anything different. It wasn't as if Cheshire had ever said how long she'd been planning on staying.

Dishes were next, because on closer inspection he'd seen _mold_ growing on the uppermost plate, and that _certainly_ wasn't sanitary. Best to check all the food in the fridge, too. He didn't want to be blindly eating expired yogurt. The trash was starting to overflow, so that had to be taken out. Might as well vacuum the floors while he was at it. Why not clean the bathroom?

Daylight was beginning to peer through the windows by the time he was finished. He still wasn't tired, but maybe he should take a nap.

He was standing over the bed, considering the still-mussed sheets, when he noticed it. Red nail polish.

"Damn it," he muttered to the hollow room, and went to check his phone for any recent crime reports.

* * *

He noticed when the door opened. He noticed when the sound of her footsteps prefaced the thud of a heavy bag hitting the floor. He noticed when she moved to the bedroom and the mattress sighed as she dropped onto it.

"You're back." Still raspy, now with a sharp ache to go with it. He was definitely coming down with something. He didn't look up from the laptop. "You could've said something."

She sounded tired - really? Cheshire never sounded like anything when they weren't tearing into each other - when she responded. "I didn't think you'd notice."

He'd noticed.

"Where did you go?" Voice even more gruff. Maybe he needed a cough drop.

"I did a job."

Oh. Right. Food and rent weren't free.

Her face appeared in the doorway, betraying just the slightest hint of surprise. "You cleaned?"

He shrugged as if it was the most normal thing in the world, which - objectively speaking - it was. "The laundry was piling up." He attempted to clear his throat. Definitely needed a cough drop. "And you weren't here."

There was a quiet pause as they looked at each other, separated by half the apartment and the back of the couch. A siren blared down the street outside. He glanced automatically out the window, not even remembering that he was busy, and sat up as if to lurch towards the bedroom and jump into his costume, until Cheshire smirked.

"Well, look at you, Roy Harper," she drawled. "Halfway back to normal."

The name reminded him.

No time for street crime. No time for cleaning. No time for seductive assassins who inexplicably decided to take over his living space and finances. Because he was not Roy Harper.

Without a word, he turned back to his laptop. No time. He didn't notice Cheshire's face darken as she silently withdrew into the bedroom and closed the door.

No time.


	9. Chapter 9

_There was a time when you let me know_

_What's really going on below_

* * *

He didn't normally bother with memories these days, unless they were to help recall important details about the Shadows.

But these were important details of another kind, ones he had strangled with anger and guilt until they were good and buried. He didn't know why they surfaced, or even how, but they were strong and insistent and wouldn't be ignored. He sighed, laid back amidst his papers and tracking devices, and allowed himself to remember.

* * *

It had been a long week. A long year, if he was being truthful. Making the decision to go solo had been the right one - if he wasn't going to be respected, then there was no point in staying with Ollie, and even less point to joining the Junior Justice League - but also one that meant a _lot_ of work. He had to build an individual repoire with the authorities of Star City, set up his own equipment caches across the country, and find and fund his own missions. It was exhausting. Which was why he was particularly glad to have returned to his apartment that night to find _her_ waiting for him.

She'd been over several times before, mostly breaking in while he was out - she didn't seem to like waiting or buzzing in from the street - and snooping around his things or running up his cable bill until he came back. This time, though, she'd been lying on his bed with a book, reading, with brows puckered ever so slightly as she concentrated on whatever book it was, one leg crossed over the other and airborne foot jiggling up and down to a secret and erratic beat.

It shouldn't have been as appealing as it was.

She'd tossed the book aside - his stomach had lurched - as he'd entered the room, shedding his bow and quiver as he went, and she had sprung up onto her knees in one fluid motion with a feline grin of greeting.

"Finally," she'd purred as she reached out and reeled him in like he was the biggest catch any master assassin had ever not killed. She'd actually licked her lips. "Your Robin Hood books were getting old."

"I like those books," he'd grunted against her plump and demanding lips, breath already coming in ragged gasps as they both struggled against the movements of the other in a desperate race to tear each other's clothes off.

He hadn't been... overly experienced when Cheshire had snuck into his life, but he was experienced enough to know that sex like this came along once in a lifetime, if you were lucky. At that point, he'd figured he was one of the luckiest men in the world in that department.

"I'm going to ambush your little friends this week."

Except that his fuckbuddy belonged to the farthest-reaching multi-national ninja gang that had ever stalked through the night.

Really, their situation was ridiculous. It was impossible that they'd even gotten together in the first place, but to have maintained their non-relationship for so long was plain old insane. Especially when they laid in bed and chatted about their tailing and ambush plans.

"Sounds dangerous." He might've been more concerned if he hadn't been distracted by the soft touch of Cheshire's fingertips tracing lazy patterns up and down the inside of his arm. It was amazing how those fingers could grip tighter than a vice one moment and flutter lighter than a butterfly the next. "I hope no one's going to get hurt."

"Not likely. Riddler's leading."

They both chuckled at that.

The soft tickling was becoming too much. He snatched her fingers away from the crook of his elbow just as she rolled closer to steal a kiss. It wasn't long before she was straddling his hips - again - and sucking on the throbbing pulse in his neck with the most bizarre combination of aggression and slow tenderness. Just when the pressure was about to overwhelm him, she shifted her lips to his ear and whispered, "I'm thinking of throwing the mission."

They would talk more about it later, but right then and there, that was the single sexiest and most arousing thing she'd ever said to him. Until a short while later, when that title was earned by another but wholly different murmur in his ear.

* * *

Or had it been gasped? Come to think of it, it might not have been anywhere near his ear. It definitely could have been shouted or screamed, possibly snarled. Maybe it had been screeched. Cheshire could get very loud when she was... excited.

He sighed and rubbed a hand against his bleary eyes. All he knew for sure was that it had been a while since she had done any of those things. He looked around himself - surrounded by his papers, profiles, maps, and lists - and jolted upwards as if stabbed with an iron poker.

There was no time to sit and remember. He was working on stolen time - cloned time - and every second spent in selfish reflection was a second that _he_ wasn't living free.

* * *

_But now you never show it to me, do you?_

Keeping track of non-Roy Harper things was a luxury he didn't have anymore. He didn't notice how Cheshire slipped away from the apartment more and more. It didn't register that her presence became a rarity in the rooms that were always dark now. The fact that she was frequently gone - sometimes for weeks at a time - went unseen by his night eyes. He never asked, and didn't talk about it. Even when she was around, they didn't talk about much anymore. If they talked at all.


	10. Chapter 10

**Sorry about the delay. Hopefully this isn't a disappointment after all the suspense.**

* * *

_And remember when I moved in you_

_And the holy dove was moving too_

_And every breath we drew was hallelujah_

* * *

Looking back, he supposed there were days when he'd realize that for all his researching, tracking, and hunting, no real progress was being made. He would catch a scent and chase it until every last whiff of it had dissipated, but there were short periods in between when he would do things like a normal person: train, call Dynah, watch the news. His mania was not absolute; there were breaks sprinkled throughout the months spent tirelessly searching. Conservatively sprinkled - no matter what the mood, he still knew he wasn't a real person, so what right had he to enjoy the perks of humanity? - but they still existed.

This particular day had started out quietly. He'd just returned the night before from South Africa, with nothing more to show for it than a few bug bites and sunburns. Cheshire was there, unexpectedly - she had been gone herself when he'd left.

The morning after his return, she walked in just as he slipped a finished omelette onto a fresh plate, already garnished with toast and sitting beside two cups of steaming coffee. Two perfectly-shaped eyebrows had quirked upwards as if in question, but she'd seen enough of such days to know what to expect. She accepted her breakfast in silence as he steeled himself for what he had to say.

He assumed - later - that she hadn't expected what came after the cream he'd passed across the counter.

"You don't have to stay here, Chesh."

She'd looked up from her magazine just long enough to give him a half-inquisitive and half-disparaging look before returning to her food.

He scowled and flipped another omelette on the griddle. This was hard enough to say without her being difficult.

"You don't have to... be with me."

Her dark head stayed tilted down towards the page.

Maybe he wasn't being clear. "You shouldn't waste your time with someone who isn't even a real person." Each syllable was ground out in his voice that was always rough now, spoken forcefully to the eggs he was cracking on the side of the frying pan.

"Don't tell me what I should or shouldn't do, Red," she said sharply to the article that must have been truly absorbing.

He was glad she hadn't glanced up so he didn't have to attempt to control the shock on his face. He'd expected her to agree with him, or say nothing, or simply get up and leave. He hadn't expected... defiance.

"If I want to waste my time with you, then I will."

"All I do is take your money and ignore you." He wasn't blind to himself, not on these days of clarity. He knew what had been happening. Why did she bother to stick around? "And I'm a _clone_." There was always that. He hadn't even been born - technically, he was only about ten years old. "What could _possibly_ make you want to stay?"

This time when she looked up from the magazine, she seemed to focus all of her energy on staring him down. It was a formidable stare, no doubt; black eyes glared out at him from under the silky crown that very nearly crackled with some unnamed fury. He couldn't think of a time when she had glowered at him like this before.

"I don't have to explain myself to you," she hissed lowly, and he noticed how white her knuckles were clenched around her fork.

He left it at that.

* * *

Not too long afterwards, he was hunched over his arrow kit on the couch. He'd lost too many in South Africa - his home arsenal was running too low for comfort, though that was probably just from force of habit. It wasn't as if he had any use for arrows in Star City now. Cheshire sauntered in from the bedroom without a word to fold herself into a sitting position on the opposite end of the couch. At the feel of her eyes drilling into the side of his face, he turned.

"You're a fucking mess," she informed him conversationally.

He thought about it for a second, then nodded. It was true enough.

"And before you open your mouth to ramble on about finding the '_real'_ Roy," she cut in with no small amount of annoyance, just as he was indeed opening his mouth to do so. She kicked the arrow out of his hand with a well-placed flick of a slender ankle. He'd been glancing back at it, wondering if he should substitute the net feature for an explosive. "I will do whatever the fuck I please, and since you have your ginger head shoved too far up your ass to see anything besides your neurotic obsession, I'll be making all the decisions around here, not you. So either nut up and snap out of it, or shut up and deal."

She finished her little speech - more than she had probably spoken to him in the last three weeks - with a self-satisfied smirk and a flash of obsidian eyes. He was too surprised to do anything but agree.

He hadn't known what he was getting into.

* * *

There were quite a few things he would have put higher on the list of likely things Cheshire would do with her newly acknowledged dominance. Trying to prevent him from continuing his search, for instance - though he knew that she knew that that would be as near to impossible as anything could be. Evidently, it was much nearer the impossible than the two of them signing a marriage license together.

He didn't know whose idea it was. There had been a considerable amount of whiskey and sake consumed the night of the omelette breakfasts - Cheshire had left in the afternoon and returned with the multicultural drinks and a grin as wide as her namesake's - and they had emerged with a handful of blurry bare-skinned cell phone photos and an unexplainable resolution to visit city hall the next day.

No fairy tale wedding for them. He wore jeans and she had tugged on one of her usual chic black dresses, and they came prepared with Tylenol and water bottles with the smell of booze and sex still lingering about them like a persistent perfume. They paid the fee and signed their names - hers was Jade Nguyen? Why hadn't he bothered to ask before? - were congratulated by the suits in the licensing department, and were back in the apartment as husband and wife before noon.

Husband and wife. He'd never thought it would have happened like this. No fuss, no ceremony. They didn't even bother with rings.

He didn't feel any different, and she wasn't acting any different. She didn't even say anything as they climbed the three flights of stairs in his - _their_ - shitty building that didn't have an elevator, or as they threw themselves onto the bed for midday hangover naps. Till death did they part, but he was still himself, and she was still Cheshire. Or Jade Nguyen.

Hold on - not Nguyen. Harper.

* * *

The sun was gone and the city was casting its neon shadows when he woke. The pounding behind his eyes had lessened, but the lightness from the night before still filled his body with a molten warmth. It was probably still the sake trickling through him.

"Don't tell me you're still hungover."

He rolled onto his back to find Cheshire - _Jade_? - on her side beside him, head propped up on one hand and smirking at him. "You're such a lightweight," she teased, and her low voice sent a heated kind of chill down his spine.

"You should know as my wife that I don't get out much," he retorted only half-grumpily. Whether or not he was still a little drunk or hungover, his new _wife_ - it was weird to think of her that way, but it was true - was lying very close to him and was starting to drag her fingers over the length of his arm. He had a history of not having much resistance to her touch on his skin.

He couldn't repress a shudder as the warmth pulsing through him intensified. Her smirk widened, making the cat on the opposite wall pale in comparison. "That's fine by me," she whispered in his ear. "We can have a good time right here."

This time, in spite of their banter, there was no scratching. No yelling, screaming, or screeching. Even with the semi-aggressive exchange before their lips met, what followed was slow and thought-out. They even managed to stay in the bed. They took their time, for the first time - every other fuck of theirs had been loud and insistent and antagonistic, but when he pushed into her and she tilted her hips for him, it was with a tenderness they had never used before, and their rhythms matched just as their breathing did in a surge of warmth that he felt seep into her, too.

It was over. He could no longer deny that this femme fatale from the shadows - more dangerous than the double-edged blades that she loved to brandish about - was the biggest non-shattering change in his life since Oliver Queen had driven through Arizona. He'd been pushing the idea away every waking moment since that wintery weekend in St. Louis, first because he didn't want to admit that he'd put aside everything loyal or heroic about himself for a few erotic rendezvous, and then because his life had been upturned by the terrible truth of his existence.

And now he had married her, blades and shadows and all, and she had done the same with his all-consuming mission and artificiality.

Remarkable.

"This is technically our wedding night, you know," he murmured in her ear as she exhaled an unexpectedly shuddery breath against his neck.

"Well, when you say it like that," she grinned, and practically purred as he trembled inside her, "I just feel cheap for having it in this crappy apartment."

* * *

**This was labeled "work in progress" for so long that it would either have to be scrapped or published. You tell me if I made the right decision.**


	11. Chapter 11

_Hallelujah_

* * *

He was out there.

Roy was out there.

He'd picked up whispers, rumors of the kind that he lived for. A department-less research facility whose scientists had never published and was never inspected by the government, and never wanted for funds. No declared focus or definitive description of the kind of equipment housed there. These were his kind of red flags, and after a seven hour chartered helicopter ride, he'd made it.

Costa Rica.

* * *

It was a nearly impossible place to find, but giving up wasn't an option. Even slowing down wasn't permissible. It wasn't anywhere near a city or town, wasn't located on a map, and appeared to generate its own power - it wasn't even on the grid. To top things off, his Spanish was rustier than he'd thought, and the locals spoke an unfamiliar dialect. He could barely ask for directions to the nearest car rental.

In the past, he would have already researched all car rentals in the area, compared models and prices against the type of driving he expected to do for the mission, and would have reserved his preferred make and model ahead of time. But there wasn't time for detailed preparations now - _he_ was waiting.

The place took four days to find. It stood, cement and blockish and windowless, like a prison somewhere between Tortuguero and Guapiles on a thickly forested tract of land. Brick walls adorned with barbed wire forbade entrace. He slipped over the top without a grimace when a barb bit into the side of his hand. All pain was bearable when he compared it to Roy's pain.

He snuck in carefully, ears pricked for footsteps or gunfire and eyes searching for cameras so he could take them out before he was detected, but it was too quiet. No footsteps came, and gunfire would have been a welcome demolition of the weighty hush.

The place was empty.

Rage, frustration, disappointment, guilt - he roared it all down the endless halls of the abandoned facility, though the inches of dust on every surface deadened the sound. He couldn't even fume properly.

Nothing. Just another dead end, another reminder of how useless and ineffective his existence was. There wasn't even evidence that the Shadows had ever used the building. He'd come all that way for nothing.

* * *

Defeated once again, he slunk back to Star City with the darkness of the lightless halls eating through him with a vengeance that could never be his. Cursed to be forever empty-handed. Failure.

He returned to find more emptiness.

Cheshire was gone.


	12. Chapter 12

**Since a few anons in reviews have asked, my timeline for this story is this: Cheshire moved in about nine months after St. Louis (two or three months after the clone bit surfaced). They married maybe another three or four months after that, and only a few weeks later, Roy went to Costa Rica. This chapter takes place in the days following the first month (so many dates!) after Cheshire left.**

**Enjoy.**

* * *

_Maybe there's a god above_

_But all I've ever learned from love_

_Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you_

* * *

Cheshire was gone.

It took a few days to sink in. He kept finding himself waiting for her, as if she would walk in any moment with a sassy smirk and a bag full of cash and a you-don't-want-to-know wink, like the last time she'd disappeared. But three days passed, and there was no word. Then a week. Another empty three weeks had gone by before it fully hit.

His wife had left him.

After an entire month of waiting - moping around, Ollie would have said if he had seen - it was time to begin his search again. He'd lost too much time on personal matters while Roy Harper had been waiting for him for years. If Cheshire didn't want to come back, then she wouldn't - married or not. End of story. At least, he tried to make it the end of their story.

* * *

He saw her once.

He'd been doing better. He'd stopped listening for her at the door, stopped folding the green bath towels she'd brought sometime after invading his apartment, stopped playing his music that she hated in the kitchen. Whether or not it was because he'd stopped going back to the place entirely was beside the point. He'd been doing better.

She was there at a low-level Cadmus lab when he broke in after hours. He walked straight into a room full of Shadows thugs. So much for listening at doors - he really should have known to check the building more thoroughly for late workers.

She saw him first. The room was filled with smoke from the bombs on her belt before anyone could react. As quickly as he could - still not fast enough - he had his bow nocked and taut and was shooting in the murky haze at anything that moved. From the cries and dark falling shapes, he knew he hit a few, but not enough.

He waited silently, bow restrung and listening to the quiet scrambling sounds of escaping ninjas, which really should have been soundless - those Shadows must have lowered their bar. The smoke was beginning to clear when he found her. Red and white mask covering all expression, she glanced down at him from the window she was slipping out of just as he laid eyes on her. For a moment they watched each other, and he wondered if she might say anything. But she turned away and dropped through the narrow opening and hit the ground below at a sprint, and vanished into the night.

They hadn't said a word to each other.

* * *

It turned out that night was pointless. He'd hoped that a soiree of Shadows would mean that the place was important enough to warrant that many guards, but it looked like they'd only been using it as a pay-off point. They'd left a mound of cash on the long metal table - at least there was something to be gained from his search.

As he shoved clips of hundreds into his suit - which would smell like pepper and gunpowder for a month now - he wondered if any of that money was hers. Weren't spouses supposed to have equal rights to shared funds? Maybe he should've read that spousal law booklet from the city hall. Had she pulled a job herself, or was she only facilitating the distribution?

No. Fuck city hall, fuck villainous trade-offs. He refused to let the encounter shake him. Why should he care what she did with her time or money? She'd left, and he'd been doing better. He didn't even think about it until two days after when he hunkered down in a pay-by-the-hour motel for an hour or two of sleep. And possibly a shower, if he could remember afterwards.

Maybe if he'd seen her face it would have been different. Maybe he would've been sieged with anger or want or nostalgia, but it had been a long time since they'd caught each other out in the field, and he'd gotten so used to seeing her dark angular face with razor cheekbones and taunting eyes that were such a deep brown that they almost seemed black. Would he have seen her smile, if she hadn't been wearing the mask? Maybe her laughing, teasing grin because she'd caught him so off-guard. Would he have seen her murderous scowl? She could have been angry that he'd barged in and broken up their payday party. She'd always taken pride in earning a living off her trade - she'd called killing and thieving an art once. Had she been expecting him to show up there, and made sure to leave the steel covering her face? She'd been around long enough to know that he would check every last possible place until he found Roy, dead or alive.

But it didn't matter what he might have seen. She was always meticulous around her... coworkers, and that night had been no exception. He'd only seen the grinning cat. He could deal with that, even if it did remind him of their bedroom now.

* * *

He'd always considered himself - when he'd had the luxury to consider such things - to be ambivalent towards religion and spirituality. If a god existed, it was probably as a force that humankind could never begin to comprehend, so he'd figured there was no point in trying. But as he lay there, feeling the exhaustion tugging at every ounce of his body and yet unable to quiet the racing of his thoughts or the constant pumping of adrenaline through his aching veins, he realized that if a god did exist, it was a sick bastard. A meddling sadist. What else could come up with such a twisted fuck of a life as his? To summarize: clone bred to destroy his own friends, cursed to hunt down the enigma of his original, and hopelessly, insensibly, stupidly in love with his own enemy.

In love with? No. Impossible. She had routinely ruined his clothes, made him eat rabbit food, watched Vietnamese dramas with the volume too high while he was trying to work, and got him gut-wrenchingly drunk. Not to mention the whole assassin pawn of the Shadows twist. She was a distraction, a break from the crushing reality that stalked him everywhere he went.

Wasn't she?

He was such an idiot.

Alone in the rickety bed with scratchy sheets, he grunted a grudging sigh. Either way - love or not, married or not, enemy or not - she had left, and he was rolling around sleepless in the dark. Again.


	13. Chapter 13

**These are just coming out like crazy...**

**Correction to last chapter's timeline: I forgot (really. How?) that Roy spend several years looking for his original, though in my head, it isn't quite as many as the time skip in the show. Do with that what you will.**

* * *

_It's not a cry that you hear at night_

_It's not somebody who's seen the light_

_It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah_

* * *

"Roy? Roy, honey, it's Dynah. It's been months since we heard from you, and Oliver and I are worried. We're all worried. Call me when you get this. Love you."

Ah. _Love._

She was getting him confused with the real Roy Harper again; Dynah did that a lot. She couldn't possibly love _him_. I twas the original Roy she was thinking of, the original Roy she'd called, the original Roy she loved. He supposed that the similarities between them might make the confusion understandable - he did have the real Roy's face, for fuck's sake - but years had passed. It was time for her to wrap her head around the fact that the Roy on her speed dial was the wrong Roy.

Maybe if everyone realized that, they would start looking again. Dynah, Oliver, Kid, Robin - even Batman had given up, despite the man's legendary obsessive perseverance. It had to have been because they'd forgotten; if they could just remember, they wouldn't keep calling him and leaving 'I love you' messages.

* * *

The most ridiculous response he'd heard to it all was that it didn't seem important.

Cheshire had told him, that night on the roof, that it wasn't important where he came from. Not that she was any standard to base solid judgments off of, but he remembered that night as if it had happened every night since.

"It doesn't matter," she'd murmured against his skin as the warm water of the hot tub skated over and between them, and he remembered closing his eyes against the feeling, light as air, of her lips on his throat.

"You're insane." She had to be. There was no other explanation. She should be disgusted, repulsed, afraid. He could barely be called human, and she was licking happily at the corner of his jaw.

"I might be. But that's not important, either." Weightless in the water, she moved even closer and perched herself on top of his bare thigh with a small trickling sound of displaced water. Warm wet fingers found their way to the back of his neck and stroked at the short hair there. "You're here, and I'm here. Why not make the best of it, Red?"

In spite of the heat of the water and her naked body touching his, chills shot up his spine.

With a swift motion, he reached up and removed her hands from around his neck. It felt too good for a fake meat suit like him to enjoy.

"There's nothing positive that can be made of any of this," he ground out against her upturned lips. It was probably unethical for him not to do more to discourage the attentions of somebody as clearly mentally ill as she was.

"You're such a grouch," she replied and, completely ignoring his protests, slipped her arms back around his shoulders and pulled him deeper into the water with her.

* * *

He should have been able to resist her. He'd had all his training and at least eighty pounds on her. Everything had been in his favor that night, but somehow she'd quieted his self-deprecating anguish and convinced him to stay. In hindsight, it hadn't taken much - a few watery embraces, deep-throated kisses, and forceful whispers of exactly what he'd needed to hear.

Cheshire was different. She'd had no delusions anywhere along the line about what he was - his discovered that she'd witnessed a good portion of his growth and deployment by the Shadows - and never forgot who she was talking to or arguing with or fucking. _It's doesn't matter._

It mattered everything in the world.

Almost everything, anyway.

* * *

He used to look forward to the nighttime. First because it meant a chance to give his tired body a rest, back when he was training as Speedy and then protecting the streets on his own as Red Arrow. When Cheshire came along to infiltrate the darkness, he would wait out the daylight hours until she would appear, and they would fill the room with the loudest fuck cries he had ever sworn he didn't make.

Now his nights were silent: either silently stalking through locked doors and dark halls in pursuit of _him_, or silently pressing callused palms to his weary eyes in pathetic attempts to blind himself to thoughts of _her_.

Both were always fruitless.

* * *

They found him once.

It was a waste of his time, talking with them on that roof. He had the bribe money he needed to take the next step in his search, but the window was only open for so long before Roy would be moved again. They didn't understand, and listening to the lecture shit they had to say was only a waste of his energy. Accidentally passing a wedding party on the street the week before had kept him up for days with memories of the honeymoon in his apartment - he had precious little energy left. Seeing their sad and concerned faces was a waste of the fleeting patience he had to draw on those days. If they weren't going to help, then he didn't want their pity.

"Come back to the light, Roy," Oliver had implored, and the pleading in his face and voice had pushed him over the edge.

"It's not me you're missing," he'd growled before leaping off the roof and away from all those pitying eyes. "The only light left for me is the one all of you have given up on."

He tried not to remember the way Dynah's face had crumpled - subtlely, because she was above everything a toughened fighter, but he'd caught it anyway - as he'd turned his back.

* * *

He hadn't bothered clearing out his old apartment when he'd picked up the search again; there wasn't anything there he'd wanted to keep. Everything had probably been tossed onto the street, to be broken or carried away. He made sure his next residence was even shittier than the last - he neither wanted nor could afford anything close to resembling a home, or even a livable space. Where he slept was a reflection of the shell that slept there - he never felt guilty about returning to this place for a nap or a rare protein shake.

The place was still dark when he reached it that night - just as he'd left it. He crashed onto the ratty couch just after getting in, still in his suit. Extraneous clothing was another unnecessary luxury that he couldn't afford anymore.

The last thing he'd been expecting was a visitor in this hole.

"You're looking as bright and chipper as ever, sweetie."

The taunting lilt of the voice was unmistakable.

"Really, Red? You're going to shoot me _now_?"

Right. The bow. He tossed it aside, arrow and all, as she stepped into the pool of light coming from the uncovered window, grinning as widely and teasingly as ever.

She was back.


	14. Chapter 14

_Hallelujah_

* * *

It had been a whole year since he'd returned from Costa Rica. A whole year since the crushing weight of failure had awakened him to what he'd sacrificed. And that sacrifice now looked him in the eye and said the words he'd craved like an addict for so long.

"I've found him, Red."

* * *

Cheshire had him rehabilitated in a matter of weeks. He would've thought that the time meant for catching up on sleep, re-training himself in marksmanship, regaining all that shrunken and atrophied muscle, and being force-fed five thousand calories a day would have crawled by at a painfully sluggish pace now that he knew that his absolution was soon to come, but he filled out and they were on a chopper - piloted by his new co-rescuer - before he'd really had time to wrap his head around the idea.

They were going to find him.

While he was in shock, he'd asked her how the hell she'd gotten Roy's location after the League and then he had sought for it for years.

"I can go places you good guys don't," was all she offered in reply.

Though he questioned his current good guy status, he hadn't pushed it.

* * *

The Tibetan Himalayas were ringing with the roaring winds of a snowstorm, but he felt no cold. If Cheshire hadn't stuffed him into a parka, he would've leapt out of the helicopter with his usual bare arms and thin spandex.

"Get your head on straight," she'd growled over the shriek of the gale, and he felt her vice-like grip on his wrist even through his numbing anticipation. "No mistakes tonight."

And there weren't any. No major ones, anyway - inadvertently alerting all the converted temple's guards to their presence hadn't derailed the mission in the slightest. The two of them, surprisingly enough, made a good team; their wood-be killers were barely a challenge to their combined strength and speed.

The real challenge was facing _him_.

He looked so young. Nothing like the reflection he'd been examining in the mirror ever since that fateful night. He was just a boy, really - the child that had bitten off more than he could chew and had been abducted at the ripe age of fifteen. And then there was his wound.

It was _him_. The real Roy Harper, after all this time - he couldn't believe it, but there he was.

He didn't regain consciousness when Cheshire opened the hibernation pod, or when he was caught by his matured double, or when they wrapped him up and carried him out into the storm. He was motionless all through the trip back to Star City.

He didn't respond to the doctors in the ICU, or to the sound of Oliver's astonished and overjoyed voice. He didn't wake for any of the tests that were run on him, or for the parade of incognito capes that came to visit - to pay their respects.

It was unreal. So many years of believing, of researching and hunting and slumming for leads. He knew there might not be much of a Roy Harper left to find, but seeing him surrounded by monitors and white coats and hushed friends was not what he'd pictured.

"Are you his next of kin?" a nurse had asked once. Their identical features and bone structure were a dead giveaway.

Was he? If not him, then who else?

"Uh. Yes."

They'd given him forms to fill out and sign, but what was he supposed to write in the "relationship" box? Clone? They would have him hospitalized, too - the news that that kind of technology existed hadn't been released to the public yet. Son? No one would believe that - a teenager couldn't possibly have fathered a man in his twenties. Besides, they couldn't have been farther from father and son.

"Why not 'brother'?" Cheshire had suggested from beside him, in her typical bored voice with raised eyebrows. Always with the taunting.

She hadn't left him that first night. Which was probably a good thing - he would have struggled over that simple question for weeks if she hadn't been there to fill in his confusion with her reason, however mocking.

"Brother," he'd repeated, and looked through the glass wall that separated the two Roys. His smaller, rounder face was younger, lolling backwards on the enormous hospital pillow, but still his own - ten years ago, he'd had that same face. "Brother." It didn't exactly fit, but it was the closest they were going to get.

"I can do that."


	15. Chapter 15

**Yes, yes, this is ages overdue - I only hope it lives up to everyone's expectations.**

* * *

_I did my best, but it wasn't much_

_I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch_

* * *

Sometime between when Cheshire came back and when it was time to gather up the cold weather supplies - was it important when? - they had to talk. Not because either one made the other, since he knew he didn't want to chat about it and because she liked to talk about her feelings about as much as a normal person liked root canals, but it was inevitable.

"Jade." it was a special occasion - he might as well use her real name. "I..." Nope, he definitely didn't want to chat about it.

She blinked her wide black eyes expectantly.

"Spill it."

Just as subtle as ever.

The words refused to come out: _thank you for coming back_. The phrase itself spoke volumes he didn't think he could voice. So he did the only thing he could think of. He reached out, slowly, giving her more than ample time to draw away, but she only watched with an unreadable face as he took her hand. Her fingers may have twitched away just once, but that was probably from force of habit - neither of them had ever condoned physical contact that didn't directly involve throwing one or the other of them against the nearest wall.

With his other hand, he ran his knuckles lightly over the dramatic lines of her jaw and cheekbones, staring silently for the thousandth time at the only face he'd ever seen that was angular and delicate at the same time. It didn't seem genetically possible that something be angular _and_ delicate.

Then again, cloning didn't used to seem genetically possible either, but there he was.

He'd meant to be considerate and gentle about everything, but "gentle" had never been Cheshire's style.

"Are you going to kiss me, or just stand there touching my face till we're old and grey?" she demanded after only a few seconds in a voice that was confusingly sexy.

Well, then.

It had been more than a year. He could feel how clumsy he was, lips more blundering than caressing, but she didn't seem to care. She reached up, simultaneously pulling him down lower and dragging herself up higher by his shoulders with that rough but seductive way she had, and his appetite grew as she clung tighter and tighter. She licked all the way at the back of his tongue, and he shuddered so hard that their foreheads smashed together.

"Nice touch, Red," she chuckled deprecatingly into his mouth, and it was only partially from being laughed at that he fisted a hand into her thick hair and yanked her head back.

It seemed incredible that she'd even come back, but to return so readily seemed downright insane. She was reacting just as enthusiastically as he felt, which made no sense at all, even to his desire-addled brain. She should have been closed off and cautious after the way they'd left things - he may have been self-obsessed, but he wasn't blind - but from the way she pressed her hips against his, caution was the last thing on her mind.

"I have to know," he breathed into her neck, taking in the scent of cherry blossoms that was always stronger there. A year ago, he might've been embarrassed that his breath was running so ragged only "Why did you come back?"

She laughed again, the low and haunting sound that brought back memories of late nights and horribly subtitled Vietnamese dramas and spilled popcorn covering his sheets. She pulled him in closer and ran slender fingers through the hair she had cut again just the other day as he moved his lips to her prominent collarbones.

"Does it matter, Red?"

He supposed it didn't.


	16. Chapter 16

_I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you_

* * *

There was nothing that wasn't weird about talking to him.

He'd woken up from the coma after a few days. The doctors had no enlightening information, but Wally - smart-ass pre-med student - had said something about the kid's body detoxing itself from the drugs that had kept him under for so many years making for an unpredictable recovery.

He was there in the room less than an hour after the nurses had first noticed the flutter of the invalid's eyes.

Roy was... confused. He understood, it was a lot to take in, and Ollie's weepy explanation probably did little to inform or comfort the teenager who was seeing the light of day for the first time in nine years. The abduction, the clone - he watched the kid's face tighten as they were formerly introduced - the incarceration, the search. He almost wished they could have held off on some of the narrative, but he and Ollie had discussed it the night he'd returned from Tibet - Roy needed to know everything, but some things none of them would ever know.

"My arm," Roy rasped, left hand clenching and unclenching on his thigh. He stared, either from wrathful disbelief or pain and rage, at the stump just below his right elbow as if his wrist and hand had been replaced with an alien appendage. "Why did they take my arm?"

He'd been looking at the wound too, determined not to shy away from the truth so he would be able to accept full and unflinching responsibility.

Beside him in their visitors' chairs, Oliver sighed. "We're not sure. Batman thinks it might've been so the Shadows didn't have to keep all their... assets in one place. In case of discovery."

In the bed, looking so young and so angry, Roy let out a bark of a laugh. "The way I see it, they could've left me in one piece and kept me in the lobby of your penthouse and wouldn't have had to worry about being discovered, seeing as you looked so tirelessly for me."

The tears in Ollie's ocean-blue eyes were sparklingly clear. "I didn't know, Roy. None of us knew until - "

"Yeah, I heard you the first time," the teen spat with enough venom to fix the Kobras up for years, and turned his graze on the second chair before Ollie could reach out a hand to him.

It was weird, to hear his voice like that without having opened his mouth. It was weird to watch his own emotions play out in his own expressions on his own face, as if he were looking through a window in time. But that pain and rage wasn't quite his own; that clenching hand, that bandaged elbow, those hurt eyes weren't quite his own. They were similar, obviously, but untempered by his own years and recent experiences. This boy in the bed was the first Roy Harper, but not the only one.

* * *

That first meeting was hard. He hadn't said much - it didn't seem like he'd been expected to - but he'd promised to return as he'd stood and followed his slump-shouldered ex-mentor out the door. Roy had watched him go with a steely expression, but hadn't responded.

He thought it best to give the boy a few days to get acclimated. Being in a comatose state for so long had its physical effects, and he knew from a helpful nurse that Roy was scheduled to begin physical therapy before long. There was a lot of shrunken muscle to wake up after nine years of lying in a hibernation pod.

When he did return, he was braced to do a lot more talking, but original Roy had only one question.

"So what are we, exactly?"

The million dollar question.

He'd been working on that one ever since he'd had to fill out that admittance form. For years he'd been so focused on finding the real Roy that he didn't know what was supposed to happen now. He'd accomplished everything he'd ever set out to do, but it wasn't the end of the story.

"Look," he began, and faltered at Roy's unexpectedly open face. In that face, he saw everything Roy wanted and everything he needed to say. Both of them only wanted the truth. He took a steadying breath and began again.

"I don't think I need to tell you that finding you was everything I've been working for in the past few years, but honestly, now that we're here, I don't know where to go."

"Don't you have a life?" Roy asked, with some mixture of disdain and curiosity.

"Yeah, I do." It was true now - he hadn't slept alone a single night since Cheshire had shown up.

"Then just go off and do whatever you want. It's not like you suddenly need my permission to wear my face."

The words were sharp and angry, but he hadn't expected anything less.

"We don't have to be strangers, Roy."

He'd thought about this, too, and talked it over with Oliver and Dynah. They'd all agreed that it would be best and easiest for everyone if nobody tries to pretend like none of it had happened, and as Dynah had pointed out, that meant acceptance - on everyone's part.

Roy snorted from the bed. "What, you think we can just be best friends?"

Again - not an unexpected reaction. They really were alike.

As he stood, he dropped a piece of paper on the nightstand and saw Roy's eyes flicker over it. By address and phone number, if you ever need it." He was almost out the door before he turned to look back at his original, who suddenly looked more lost and tired than he'd seen, but it was only because it was his own face that he could see it.

"Give me a call sometime."

It may have been strange, talking to a guy with same name, face, and voice who he'd dedicated years to finding, but he was still just a kid. And maybe his older clone would have something more valuable to offer someday than just half-answers and scared looks.


	17. Chapter 17

_And even though it all went wrong_

_I'll stand before the Lord of Song_

_With nothing on my tongue but hallelujah_

* * *

A lot of things had gone wrong. He'd never planned on discovering that all those memories of his father and their cabin, Brave and his painstaking care with the bow, Ollie and his endless lessons on how to do what was right, were all a lie. He'd never planned on having the weight of his ephemeral DNA donor's life tossed onto his shoulders, never planned on moving in and signing a marriage license with an assassin from an international gang who would pick up and leave him in the night, never planned on dealing with the fact that _he wasn't a person_.

He had a lot of regrets and a lot of things he wished he could forget in this life that was never really his own, but he'll never forget the first time he saw her.

The world stopped. He might've thought it would've come crashing down - even further than it already had - but it didn't. It just... stopped. His racing thoughts, his already-shaky breath, his beating heart, it all stopped. There was only _her_.

He'd always treated the notion of "true love" as an excuse to sell Valentine's Day cards and expensive jewelry, but _she_ proved all of that dead wrong, and then some - it was the most powerful and overwhelming _love_ at first sight.

She was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. Her warm eyes latched onto his in the musty shadows of his cold apartment, and her knowing smile was enough to brighten the room, the street, the whole damn world and his empty soul with it.

Before, he'd questioned if he even had a soul, but the tinkling sound of her gleeful laughter erased the thought. Doubting was impossible when there was someone as innocent and open as her.

She was in his arms before he could say a word, and the sturdy weight of her anchored him like he'd never truly touched the ground before. Warm and soft and looking _into_ him like nothing else existed, like the last years of being lost and lonely and selfish meant nothing because _she_ was here and gurgling happily, he knew he would never take any of it back if it meant taking her with it. She was real, and a solid testament that he was real, too.

He'll always remember the promise he made to her, that first time he held her - the promise that obliterated all the countless mistakes he'd made in the past, and the promise that will rule and guide him forever after.

"I'm going to be a real father for you, Lian," he'd whispered, and her dark eyes had grown wide and she'd grabbed hold of one of his fingers in her whole fist with the strongest grip. It didn't matter that she was only a few months old; she saw him, she knew him, and he knew she understood completely.

* * *

He may have been a fuck-up and a clone, but there was one thing he will never regret.


	18. Chapter 18

**I kind of have my own chronology of events going on here. Don't let it throw you off. Bottom line: the Cave still exists and Arsenal is still just Roy the first. Also... it breaks my heart too much that Original!Roy is so... broken. So I'm kind of pretending that he isn't. As much.**

* * *

_Hallelujah_

_Hallelujah_

_Hallelujah_

_Hallelujah_

* * *

He never was a religious man, but he'd experienced a few miracles in his time. Not destroying the League with Shadow sleeper programming in his brain was pretty high on the list of near-impossibilities.

He made a point of visiting the Watchtower regularly now. It was important that he lend a hand where it could help, even if it meant suffering toned-down but still wary glares from Batman and overly-cheerful pep talks from Superman whenever he was around. It had been years since he was in their midst, and it was fair to say that he had more than a few things to prove. He volunteered for simple missions: recon, protective detail, crowd control. They put him back in the public eye and helped build up some of the trust and confidence he'd crash-landed into the pit of his identity crisis. They weren't the most challenging deployments, but somebody had to do the dirty work, and it might as well be him.

Managing to not have completely hacked off his friends - against all the odds - was definitely something else to be thankful for. He started running a few miles with Ollie in Star when he could and accepting some of Dynah's lunch invitations again. Not all of them - there were only so many times he could handle her scrutinizing gaze and prying questions over BLTs in a month - but enough.

More surprising than almost anything else, Red Arrow appearances at the Cave were no longer the stuff of legends and jokes. It wasn't like he went for the weekend slumber parties now, but M'gann got to the point where she would stop smothering him in one of her super-strong Martian embraces every time his League number was announced by the beta tubes. Besides, he owed it to Connor to break up the monotonous teenage squealing that only ever let up in those halls whenever Batman was around. And maybe - just _maybe_ - he went because nobody could kick his ass at chess and hand-to-hand sparring like Nightwing could.

Maybe.

* * *

Of course, there was the obvious accomplishment. The real Roy Harper was alive and as healthy as an armless archer could be. Angry and traumatized, but alive and free. And somehow, the kid didn't seem to hate him.

He never did get a call from him, but when he visited Roy - first at the hospital, then at the Cave when Ollie's offer of the old room at the penthouse was rejected - the boy never raged or shouted or so much as lost his temper with him. They were far from close, but Roy never once sent him away. They had their fair share of silent awkward moments when mention of the missing years cropped up, or when someone called their name and they both looked up, and their conversations were usually limited to simple phrases, but considering that Ollie couldn't get within twenty yards of the kid, it could've been worse.

* * *

And then there was the most unbelievable twist of them all.

"Her head needs to be up higher."

The hand that poked his elbow up was both frustrated and relieved. "You fixed it less than five minutes ago," he grumbled, but allowed his arm to hold the new angle. There was nothing he wouldn't do for his new purpose in life. He adored Lian - no matter how many times it took, he'd get the tilt of her neck right. Preferably before she was old enough to not need his support.

Cheshire's answering eye roll did not go unnoticed.

They were on the couch - a new one that Cheshire had had delivered, he still didn't know where from - and for once he had claimed control of the remote before she did. The news - in English, finally - was on low. He didn't want to risk waking the warm bundle of blankets cradled to his chest, or there would only be another, later naptime, and then there would be no point in trying to sleep that night.

"I hate how every Asian anchor's name on American TV is Chang," Cheshire complained, frowning at the overly-powdered woman on the screen. "Bunch of racists."

"Not everyone has a serious name like Nguyen," he tossed out without a thought, and if he didn't know himself, it might've sounded like playful banter. Might.

A whisper of a chuckle snuck through her lips, and Lian wriggled in her blanket at the sound. "Don't tell me you forgot already, Red."

"Forget what?"

She turned away from the TV to look at him, and for once her eyes didn't ooze the sneering boredom that was her characteristic expression. Leaning in with one hand reaching out to rest against the curve of Lian's small body, she - to his immense shock and confusion - allowed her body to rest against his, and even propped her pointed chin up on his shoulder so she could get a better look at the tiny face sleeping peacefully below.

"At least here," she said, softly so as not to disturb Lian, "my name is Harper."

He hadn't forgotten - how could he? - but the subject of their marriage status hadn't exactly been a hot topic since her return and subsequent takeover of his dusty hole of an apartment and even dustier bank account. He wasn't naive enough to think that Lian would magically make their union legitimate; he may still be young, but he was savvy enough even in this department to know that things just didn't work that way.

"Is it?" he asked. Now might as well be the time to straighten it out.

It was strange how black could be such a warm color.

Instead of answering, she simply closed the small gap between them for a careful kiss, the hand between the bottom of the blankets and his lap nudged his elbow back up a few degrees.

In that brief moment, it was almost impossible to believe that this was the same she-devil who had seduced him in a dark theater. _Hallelujah_, indeed.

* * *

No, he wasn't a religious man. He'd never been to church or temple or so much as cracked open a Bible. Those had always fallen under the category of things he didn't have the time or luxury to indulge in, let alone participate in. He'd thought he'd seen Ollie praying once, though it just as easily could have been meditation. He had no experience with asking for things or expressing gratitude to anyone who couldn't be physically found. He believed in actions and reactions and the general goodwill of regular people; celestial or omnipotent beings weren't really part of his arsenal against injustice.

But after the last few months, he began to wonder if maybe he had a few things to thank someone for.


End file.
